You are assuming that bitcoin mining will exponentially keep increasing and no new efficiencies discovered. Wrong.
Bitcoin mining is auto balancing by the value of each bitcoin. If energy spent costs more than bitcoin acquired, people will not invest in new mining hardware. How could they, or is money somehow infinite for the miners, to be able to purchase more and more gear?

FIAT money is not energy free neither.
Bitcoin is revolutionizing how money is conceived, FIAT money is basicly a huge scam, there actually are parties in this world for who money *is* infinite, such as goverments and world bank. See documentary Zeitgeist.

Bitcoin takes the power from the elite to just print more money away, and that's a bad thing?!?!

sooo... You are predicting that bitcoin will disappear in August 2016?

as long as there is bitcoin, there is miners. The reward simply halves and halves, and eventually it's the transaction fees which will cover the expense of mining. At this point 1BTC is probably 50k +

Skipping steps becomes a real issue when you start driving it faster and faster ...
and print time is a serious issue with current gen 3d printers... make it faster, without loosing precision or causing missed steps, at the same cost makes tons of sense.

It's not a matter if there is stronger and more precise machinery available - it's a matter of getting it to consumers, ie. on the cheap.
Getting price down on things is just as much a science as everything else - but it's different, and mostly engineering rather than science in instances like this.
It's about figuring out how to utilize something existing, now cheap, on creating new things.

Money is not infinite for everyone but goverments and big banks.

As with all scientific theories - they are made to be rebutted, more accepted, the better!
From his point of view it's probably very logical to take steady-state model over Big Bang Theory - so maybe he just has a deeper understanding of the subject and he's a genius .... or more likely HIS view is just that way biased, he sees Big Bang as impossible
He might be the next Einstein.... or not

IMO, our view of the universe is way too small to say either as definite, right now it looks like big bang is more plausible. Then again the energy levels involved in big bang are so insanely out there it's impossible to imagine... Infact the energy levels required are infinite to the infity, if universe is defined as infinite. Universe needs to have absolute limits in size for big bang not to return value NaN.

Until we can expand our view of the universe by .... let's say going out there at least few thousand light years away from earth, to at least 3 different directions, it's pretty much complete guesswork...

Yet, by research we started taking measurements at the coldest point in recent history of recent few hundred thousand years.
Hence, the CLIMATE CHANGE, is most likely just natural change.

This research was done by drilling into ice taking a core sample. Ice has "memory" in regards of temperatures from history, of course those are just annual average readings, but that's what GLOBAL WARMING is supposed to be as well.

If you want to see ecological damage, take a look at ground water pumping and other sweet water sources, cutting down forests. Now those are scary things!

Global warming is mostly sensationalist journalism.
Climate change on the other hand is real, and somewhat tangible. The source of which is probably nothing man made.

Nature of this little blue ball is much much more resilient than people think.

More we burn fossil fuels:
* The more vegetation will grow due to increased CO2
* Plants will clean the air, while taking in sunshine, increase the net energy content of this little blue planet, by storing it into biomass. (increase in total net energy content is a plus, we can use that biomass to make biofuels)
* More of the heat generated by using any form of energy source which has been stored (ie. fossil fuels, burning wood etc.) is radiated out of this planet
* Less heat is extracted out of the core, because the heat difference is closing
* Ice caps work as short term buffers, while they melt they release chemicals, some of which can contribute into cooling the planet.
* If temps are higher, it means more water evaporates == more of the heat is utilized on evaporation process causing cooler temperatures
* More cloudy it is, the sunshine doesn't get to surface, and is reflected backwards (clouds are rather white after all... hence reflects IR radiation) out of the planet

If any effect what-so-ever, climate change is affected much much more by eating meat than anything else.
Don't eat meat, and you could have 2x Hummer H2s humming 24/7/365, and tons of other wastefull stuff and you still contribute less to greenhouse gas emissions than average joe. Seriously, it's that much!

Much more alarming is the amount of forests being cut down, and sweet water usage levels etc. than anything relating to greenhouse gasses, global warming, climate change or whatever you want to name it.

In my opinion, the whole climate change/global warming is a huge elaborate conspiracy scam to make people pay more for their used energy, in whatever form, created by the huge hidden powers behind the mega corporations of the world, things like OPEC which is a legalized cartel working 24/7 on ways to increase fuel prices.

Oh btw, we have no such thing as shortage on fossil fuels, that's another load of crap. Today we have the means and technology to do full compatible biofuels at likely cheaper rates than barrel of oil is going for.... Tho, mysteriously those companies tend to disappear shortly after coming public with their advancements.
Current ethanol trend is just another scam to put more money on the pockets of farmers as well, very very inefficient. much more efficient methods exist than farming sugar corn etc. for making ethanol. Any biomass can be turned into ethanol rather cheaply in mass production, provided you have the right scientists working for you, thanks to bacteria and genetic engineering. Same method can be used to make any hydrocarbons on the cheap as well...

Why do these exist in? Because people in power benefit from these "problems", they work as a wonderful revenue source AND very nice distraction from actually important stuff... you know, like advancing human race as a whole and therefore endangering the position of the powers that be.

Someone would have said all the same things about electricity at home, phone, internet, cars etc.

1) Make it happen
2) Make it happen reliably and repeatably
3) Make it happen at decent speed and quality
4) Then you make it cheaper

and when you get to the point 4, things tend to start getting better quality and faster for less as well as more people adopts the tech and makes it better.

not just a toy.

it allowed us to create products affordably we couldn't otherwise make, in production, for sale. We are a typical small business with constrained budgets for creating products and small customer base.
It affords us to create products where the production costs are rather low, thus a comfortable margin product to make the product viable in the first place, with big commercial competitors, albeit the big commercial competitors have inferior products, with way higher price tag.

Further, 3d printing allowed us to rapidly prototype our product, turnaround for a new prototype can be less than one day, and we've done that many times over, and in early design stages multiple prototypes a day. Hiring a shop to machine parts for us the lead time for new prototype would be couple of weeks, and the expense would be orders of magnitude more.

Do we need more proof that the patent system is detrimental?

Let's assume the inventor won't release his invention until patent is approved - therefore we loose the advancement. It might be tiny advancement or it could be huge.

There's also examples when inventors, developers, startups don't pursue their goals because of a patent.

Indeed there are many hobbyists like that - we were just asked to provide first gen ASIC hosting, the ASICMiner 10Gh blades :O

well - the thing is that difficulty can go down as well.
Therefore it is self balancing, sure if 80% of mining power disappeared all of sudden, it would take a LONG time before reaching difficulty recalculation, but it would eventually happen.

It is self balancing over:
Mining costs (electricty + hardware + human time) and Bitcoin value

Costs go significantly upwards -> Bitcoin value is bound to follow -> BTC value doesn't follow, miners are stopped or moved over alternative cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin value drops -> Miners are being stopped or moved over to alternatives -> Mining costs go downwards
Bitcoin value increases -> More miners will be purchased -> Mining costs go up -> BTC Value eventually follows

Very simple really.

Even hosting business has diminishing returns, yet, that industry is larger than ever, growing at ever growing pace.
Same for networking business (Those who lay the fiber), returns are diminishing, yet they continue on investing

Infact ... Almost every single business follows the same pattern of diminishing returns, for some industries, it's the inflation which does it, and for most technological innovation
When the diminishing returns and growth reaches an equilibrium -> There is barely growth, and the returns don't diminish significantly anymore, it's called a mature industry. ie. farming is a mature industry
When the returns diminish faster than growth it's a industry dying, the MAFIAA would like you to be believe entertainment industry is like so, but they are in a huge growth period right now.
Gone industries in the past are things like steam engine builders (barely any steam engines are being produced today), automotive phones (everyone has a cell phone, and having a phone just for the car doesn't make any sense, it was a fad to begin with), and what else has gone by the way of technological innovation.

If the diminishing returns is stopped, innovation is stopped, progress is stopped.

I think eventually bitcoin mining will reach a stage where it's roughly 2 years for hardware break even including operational costs, and the additional years is your profit. That's when ASIC manufacturing has reached the same processing node and complexity as CPUs today and been there for a significant time. and we are there already, with newest chips being 28nm, just like the latest AMD CPU series - intel is at 22nm now.

It is possible that large processing node, like 65nm ASICs will stay marginally profitable even then for some time - when compared to electricity and human resources costs.

As a comparison point i'm using dedicated hosting industry, some 5 years old servers are still being sold today, and many are in production still todate.
Hell, the bulk of our cheapest option is with Q1'10 launched CPU, and we are still taking high end servers into use older than that (Intel L5520, which is 45nm) :)
Tho, in our use every single drive is new and minimum 2Tb size, not decade old models :) Lifespan for those is 3years and then phase out, 60%+ is expected to survive the 3 years, and target average lifespan of disks is 3years, so there will be some disks being used for more than 4 years, but a marginal group.

Mt. GOX withdrawals has been almost non-existant for the last year already, not for BTC side, but for FIAT side.
You had to wait 6+ months for withdrawals to go through, plus they took hidden charges they claim they don't take, don't provide receipt for that neither.

There are plenty of other exchanges, such as Bitstamp and BTC-E, they work just fine.
You can also go to localbitcoins.com and exchange for hard cash with someone in your local area.

As for BTC being a fad, you clearly don't understand the whole concept with it's all not-so-small details, what it means to the world and to the people.

FIAT currency value is 100% faith based, there's no backing etc.
If people decide today that dollar is valueless, the only value remaining is paying taxes, but if nobody accepts dollars anymore ....

Currently most, if not all, FIAT currencies are basicly money printing presses for the goverments, that's why we got so much inflation.

So you decided to skip the whole value as a tool aspect.
Great trolling there :)

Sure, bitcoin has no uses what so ever at all - then why the f* have people bought them in the first place :)

Anyone not knowing:
Bitcoin offers the greatest value there is: Freedom.
Freedom to move value how you wish, where you wish, when you wish, without anyone stopping you and at a low cost to boot.

If that is not value - human kind has already lost, and 1984 has become reality for the elite better than they could have ever hoped for.